In the Cemetery of Forgotten Books

By Richard Eder

Published: April 25, 2004

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND

By Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

Translated by Lucia Graves.

486 pp. New York:

The Penguin Press. $24.95.

When book publicists try to dress up their product in designer clothes, they reach for the verb ''meets.'' Made-up instances: ''John le Carré meets Dostoyevsky,'' for a thriller with metaphysical ambitions. ''P. G. Wodehouse meets Sophocles,'' for a tragicomedy set during an English country weekend. It's lowdown and lazy, but here goes: ''Gabriel García Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges'' for a sprawling magic show, exasperatingly tricky and mostly wonderful, by the Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón. The three illustrious meeters must surely have been drinking and they weave about a little, but steady remarkably as the pages go by.

''The Shadow of the Wind'' opens in 1945 in Barcelona, bleak and still shattered by the Spanish Civil War. Throughout, in fact, the residue of the war's fraternal horror is the grave thematic substratum beneath capers and mystifications.

Daniel, a 10-year-old boy dangerously grieving for his mother's death some years before -- ''I can't remember Mommy's face'' -- is taken by his solicitous bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. In this Borgesian labyrinth each book awaits someone to choose it, make it part of his or her life, and thereby renew its own lost life. Mostly for its handsome binding, little Daniel picks out a novel eponymously titled ''The Shadow of the Wind,'' by an obscure Spanish writer, Julián Carax. The choice will melodramatically shape the child's life, launching him as a young man, five years later, upon the garish, gothic quest that is the elaborate centerpiece of Ruiz Zafón's novel. At the same time, among other dramatic and interlocking quests that go back to the 1920's, it will shape an odd redemption for Carax's own dark tragedy.

The main story is too zestfully convoluted to set out in any detail and allow space for the lush side stories that weave through it. Briefly:

Once grown, Daniel is drawn into pursuing the mystery of Carax, supposedly killed in Barcelona at the start of the civil war. His search begins when he learns of the strange disappearance of all of Carax's novels, except for his own copy and several others in the Cemetery. For years, a man who gives himself the name of a Carax character has bought up and burned them in a series of small fires, and finally in a conflagration that destroys the publisher's entire warehoused stock.

Daniel advances his investigation through a chain of encounters with figures connected to Carax. Each gives a different, flawed spin to the eventually converging mysteries of the writer and the arsonist. A caretaker tells of Carax's troubled childhood; a woman recalls knowing him during his writing years in Paris. Clearly she was in love, but she denies she was his lover; later we learn that her denial is a lie.

A love letter turns up, mysteriously of course, pointing to a doomed affair back in the 1920's with Penélope, daughter of a rich and powerful industrialist. Her father's fond mentorship of young Carax turns to murderous rage when he learns of it, and the young man flees to Paris. Penélope dies horribly, locked in a room and giving birth unattended, her shrieks and pounding ignored. As with so much else in ''Shadow,'' the reason for the father's rage is even more twisted than it appears, and revealed only much farther along Daniel's hopscotch meander.

In one absorbing section a priest tells of a circle of school friends who grow up to divide into Carax's devoted supporters and his mortal enemies. Fumero, one of the latter and malevolent from the start, warps into a torturer and assassin, first on the Republican side and then for Franco's police. He is Carax's murderous nemesis, and, years later, Daniel's.

This doubling of searcher and searched-for continues throughout. It fulfills the message of the Cemetery: that its books will first possess and then transform the lives of those who rescue and read them. Even as a child Daniel is shadowed by the mysterious figure, disfigured and stinking of burned paper, who destroyed Carax's works. Daniel's passionate affair with Beatriz, a friend's sister, mirrors Carax's own fatal love.

What follows, though, after shifting revelations and an extended violent climax, is not tragedy but a working out from under. For Daniel and Beatriz, the outcome offers a suggestion of tentative healing.

Ruiz Zafón gives us a panoply of alluring and savage personages and stories. His novel eddies in currents of passion, revenge and mysteries whose layers peel away onionlike yet persist in growing back. At times these mysteries take on the aspect of the supernatural. The figures appear beleaguered by ghosts until these give way to something even more frightening: the creak of real floors undermined by real rot, and the inexorability of human destinies grimmer than any ghostly ones could be.

And give way as well to the redoubtable wit and grit of the Spanish character despite a tormented past; and to sudden flowery oases (Spain and its language have their Arabic touches) of the impossibly romantic and erotic. The impossible and the earthy have lived braided in the Spanish soul back through ''Don Quixote'' and beyond.

The melodrama and complications of ''Shadow,'' expertly translated by Lucia Graves, can approach excess, though it's a pleasurable and exceedingly well-managed excess. We are taken on a wild ride -- for a ride, we may occasionally feel -- that executes its hairpin bends with breathtaking lurches. But there is more to say. Return a moment to the civil war. Ostensibly an undertheme to the pyrotechnics, in fact it is the theme -- an enduring darkness that the pyrotechnics serve to light up.

Daniel's sidekick, Fermín, a former Republican agent hideously tortured by Fumero and reduced to beggary, is a Sancho for our era, a man of loose appetites and desolate sharpness. Smitten with an ultrapious and ultrainflammable maidservant who confesses three times a week -- four times in warm weather, as a precaution -- he tells Daniel: ''You don't know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot sweet potato on a winter's night.''

Under the appetites, historical hunger. From the scraps of newspaper he wraps himself in, Fermín reads a boastful account of the dams built by Franco's government. ''These fascists will turn us all into a race of saints and frogs.'' (Decades ago in Madrid, a cabdriver halted in traffic by a military parade angrily muttered: ''Who needs it? Whereas a parade of scientists, now that would be something to see.'')

By this point, Borges and Eco have stolen from the meeting. García Márquez remains, with his magical swoops entirely in the service of the tangible sorrows, speculations and ingenuities of his characters; and of their resourcefulness in the face of unmanageable histories and geographies.